16 February, 2022
Song of the Day: Dream - Imagine Dragons
I’m about to pass out after all of my meetings, exam prep/exam, labs, and lab write-ups today, but I just wanted to take a second and say f*ck the imperial units system.
I’ve admittedly tried to keep away from them as much as I possibly could when it comes to calculations, as the SI system is far superior in every possible way. However, FDL is requiring that I perform all of my calculations in imperial units, so I’ve been dealing with that. I lost an hour of my life tonight trying to figure out how I could possibly have arrived at the correct drag coefficient when my calculations state that the model was experiencing over 100 lbs of drag force, an inconceivably high number for the model and tunnel settings.
I went through, checking my units, making sure I didn’t accidentally use inches instead of feet anywhere. I hadn’t. All of my units checked out, which was my go to solution to these kinds of issues. So, I tried the calculations by hand. Same answer. At this point I was starting to lose it. Every ounce of math I could throw at it gave me the same number. And, my final answer was still correct. But I couldn’t pass it in not understanding what was going wrong.
Finally, it hit me like a ton of bricks. 1 lbf != 1 ft*lb/s^2. 1 lbf = 32.17 ft*lb/s^2. 120/32 ends up being about 4 lbs, an actually reasonable number.
What did I learn today? The imperial system is a bullshit, and slugs have actual meaning and reason to exist. At least now I know the second one.